CAVEs are expensive items and it is unlikely they will achieve market penetration. On the other hand, cell-phones are cheap and rapidly becoming ubiquitous. And if the screen-size trend (identified as far as I know by Bill Buxton) toward wall screens (big) and handhelds (small) continues, it is reasonable to assume that some (that is to say: lots of) digital writing will become mobile, geo-locative and ultimately augmented. Narratives will superimpose themselves over normative reality. There are numerous examples of geo-locative narratives done with audio (Janet Cardiff, Murmur, Teri Rueb, etc…) and the artist BLUESCREEN did a piece where fictions could only be read at specific locations, but what I want to discuss here briefly is a foreseeable form of mobile literary immersion where the reader moves freely around finding phrases that can be both seen (superimposed as if extant) and heard; literature that can be played and plays out (like Blast Theory but with augmented reality on a cellphone) as if it were real.

Not only will this expanded reading alter the accessibility of reading, it will certainly accelerate subtle shifts in perception about text, destabilizing notions of where it is, who wrote it, and how it can be shared. It seems safe to assume that it will become increasingly difficult in upcoming eras to differentiate between inscription traces that originate in matter and others that emerge from remote display processes. Writing will detach from the womb of matter even as it paradoxically becomes more location and viewer specific.

Postscript Update: Two contemporary AR practitioners of note, the poetic short-story writer and future cinema researcher Caitlin Fisher has her AR piece Requim online — I saw Requim at DAC in 2009 and was charmed by its warped nostalgia and mutant pop-up book appeal — and the other practitioner of note: poet and MIT post-doc Amaranth Borsuk whose Between Page and Screen AR work (also online) exhibited at 2010 ELO conference was both technically superb and evocative.